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Lazy Rebuilding

In this chapter Okasaki starts with a common technique data structures use to achieve efficient complexity times. A classic example are balanced binary search trees, which, on one hand, need to be balanced to avoid degenerated cases (think of a binary tree which can degenerate to a path), but on the other hand, balancing is usually too expensive to perform at every operation.

The tradeoff is to allow a certain degree of “imbalance”, such that the big-O complexity of operations does not degenerate, and to let us perform re-balances only every so often, in a way that leads to an efficient amortized complexity. Structures such as AVL trees and Red-black trees make use of this technique.

To address that problem, a technique was developed by Mark Overmars, called global rebuilding.

Global Rebuilding

The basic idea is to keep two copies of a structure in parallel, one of which we perform incremental updates (write) and the other is used for read operations. After a few operations, we copy the write version into the read-only version. The idea is that the incremental updates are cheap, but might put the structure in a state that is not suitable for reading. This allows for distributing the costs across operations such that each operation has worst case efficient bounds.

The major downside of this technique is the complexity and corner cases, because we also need to account for changes to the structure that renders the write copy of the structure invalid.

We’ll now describe yet another implementation of queues that use this technique, developed by Robert Hood and Robert Melville. Similar to other queue implementations, this structure maintains a front and rear lists, the latter in reverse order. It also has the invariant that the rear list cannot be larger than the front.

When that happens we must perform a rotation, which consists in reversing the rear queue and appending it to the end of the front queue. We cannot perform this operation piecemeal, because we only have efficient access to the first element of a list. The operation we can do partially is concatenating the reverse of a list to the beginning of another list, that is, given xs and ys, we can do ~xs + ys, where ~ represents the reverse of a list. Note we can also reverse a list, that is xs to ~xs piecemeal by having ys = [].

Now, to achieve our goal which is xs + ~ys, we reverse both xs and ys, then concatenate the reverse of ~xs to ~ys:

We can perform these operations one step at a time by using a “state machine”, we first start with a state Reversing(xs, ys) which will reverse xs and ys at the same time into ~xs and ~ys, at which point we switch to the state Appending(~xs, ~yx) which will concatenate the xs into ~ys, so then we get to Done(xs + ~ys).

The problem of keeping a separate state is that it might not be accurate by the time it’s done. In particular, if we remove an element from the front, the Appending step can be shortcut. We can keep a count of how many of the elements in ~xs of Appending are still present. If, by the time we’re appending the number of present elements goes to 0, the last elements of ~xs (that is, the first elements of xs) have been removed, so they do not need to be transferred to ~ys.

A possible implementation of the states is:

The Idle is just a placeholder to make sure the state machine can keep going to the next state even when we’re not currently performing a rotation. The state transition definition is given by:

One important detail here is that Appending ({validCount = 0; front; rear}) must appear before the other matching rule for Appending, because the other one includes this.

When we remove an element from the front of the queue we need to update the number of valid elements in the front of the rotation state:

Similar to the Real-time queues, we can guarantee constant time worst case for all the operations if we execute the state machine twice for each operation. The check() function verifies if we need a rotation and also executes the nextStep() function twice.

The other operations are then straightforward. The only thing is that pop() must call the invalidate() function because it’s decreasing the size of front:

Lazy Rebuilding

As we can see, the Hood-Melville implementation is quite involved. Okasaki argues that making use of lazy evaluation and memoization simplifies the implementation. We can indeed see that the implementation of Real-time queues is much cleaner.

One simplification is that we don’t have to sync the write copy with the read copy. We just need to make sure to execute items from the schedule by the time they are needed. Memoization will take care of the rest.

Another advantage in this case is that reversing and concatenating lazily evaluated lists does not require an intermediate reversal of the front, which means that we can remove the front element without the need to invalidate any items in the schedule.

The author provided more examples of lazy rebuilding for deques (double-ended queues) by first presenting an amortized version using the Banker’s method and then a lazy rebuilding version. The Banker’s deque and Real-time deque are also on my github.

Conclusion

In this chapter the technique behind Real-time queues was formalized. I really enjoy the organization of the book in which the author presents a data structure and from there he extracts a generic pattern of technique that can be applicable to other cases.

When I was studying data structures I don’t recall learning about general techniques underlying existing data structures, such as batched rebuilding for AVL trees and Red-black trees. That would have been interesting.